AMD CEO exits stage left

While whispers of a possible departure by AMD’s CEO Hector Ruiz have been abundant for some time, news finally reached us that he will depart his post as CEO, but will stay on as the Executive Chairman of AMD’s Board of Directors.

Ruiz has been blamed for AMD’s poor performance, but the truth of the matter in our opinion is that there is more than enough blame to go around at AMD. While AMD announced that it will take an $880 million charge that has been blamed on the poor performance of ATI’s Consumer Electronics Division, we can’t see all of the blame resting squarely on that division.

The poor reception of the Phenom and generally less than stellar performance has led AMD to give much of its market share back to Intel. Of course, the fact that AMD has not been able to get to 45nm fast enough is also partly to blame. ATI’s graphics division had some missteps as well, which also just added to the punishment that has been inflected by Nvidia as well as Intel on AMD.

It comes as no surprise to us that Dirk Meyer will replace Ruiz as the new CEO, but the number of challenges ahead of him is quite formidable. While ATI has had some very exciting recent success with the 4850 and 4870 series cards which are currently laying down the smack as the current price/performance leader, the processor side of the house is going to have to execute with something that Intel isn’t expecting in order to help drive the company back to profitability.

In the meantime, the road back from the edge for AMD is going to be difficult, but it is still possible with some very exciting potential in the pipeline, but until we get a taste of these new products it will be difficult to say how much impact they are going to have. AMD needs to recapture some of the enthusiast market space that they have lost and get enthusiasts excited again about AMD products, and it is going to take sheer performance to do this.